


but the wind goes right through you

by arbitrarily



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Canon Compliant, Dubious Consent, Enemies With Benefits, First Time, M/M, Oral Sex, Period-Typical Attitudes, Rimming, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:27:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27591356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: On a cold night one week before Christmas, Rabbi tries to negotiate with both man and fate.
Relationships: Constant Calamita/Rabbi Milligan
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	but the wind goes right through you

**Author's Note:**

> Me, white-knuckled and jaw clenched: [Has this ever happened to you????](https://media4.giphy.com/media/ZBmtomgbeGn7UyRopq/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47blavzbhb0a4k1ir7mv8xxk4hjngawho7pi1bctnn&rid=giphy.gif) both halves of your incredibly minuscule rarepair get sucked up into a tornado, literally, and you remain committed to holding onto your non-canon (and now very much so dead) ship with your bare hands, so help you???
> 
> Also me: nothing says Christmas like fraught sex as a result of a failure to see eye-to-eye with a guy who very much so wants you dead. Happy Holidays?
> 
> Timeline-wise, it feels like this show has been set "just before Christmas" from jump, but for greater specificity, let's say this is set some time after episode 4 but before episode 5. And last, while I did tag this "Dubious Consent," that's mainly due to the adversarial relationship between Rabbi and Calamita and the power dynamics between them.

Happy Christmas, your arse  
I pray God it’s our last

“Fairytale of New York,” THE POGUES

The bulbs were blinkered, gone faulty on this string of lights. Rabbi caught his bottom lip between his teeth and set to work.

Without fail, each year in the Fadda household, after Naneeda and the Donna and the children tired of the decorating, the work fell to him. And as he did each year, he wiled away more than a fair few evenings sorting through boxes of old decorations, most to be retired back to the basement, from where they came. Threadbare tinsel and broken lights, handmade ornaments and clumsy illustrations bearing Josto’s or Gaetano’s name in crabbed handwriting—it all went back into the boxes.

Rabbi did the work in a small, out of the way back bedroom. On the first floor, past the kitchen, a view of the backyard—namely dry, brown grass poking up through the minimal layer of yesterday’s snowfall. The bedroom had once belonged to Josto’s old aunt, rest her soul. She used to pat Rabbi on the cheeks and say what he had thought were the kindest things to him in Italian, Rabbi only at first able to judge by her tone and not her words. Not long before she passed—hacking away, yet still smoking like a chimney, stinking of cigarettes and anise and pickled onion alike—she took his face in her big, dry hands and offered him her usual litany. He’d picked up enough Italian by then—swears, mostly; jokes from Paolo; menacing phrases gathered from Calamita—he was finally able to understand her meaning, and it was awful. “You poor dead thing, you little ghost boy, Mother Mary, guide him home.” Aunt Philomena, she was. He glanced over to the painting of the Virgin, still doing time up there on the wall. She was well-faded from years of dust and exposure and the sunlight that slanted through the window along the opposite wall, on the better days.

Despite all that, he still thought of her fondly enough, Josto’s dead aunt, especially around this time of year. Back here, alone, in her former quarters.

The solitude didn’t last for long. This was a noisy house. Not just the voices, always bright and loud and easily violent, but it was the house itself. The creaking of floorboards, always betraying stealth; the whistling through the windowpanes where the draught found its way in; how you could hear another coming, long before they reached the door. Most houses were haunted. That was something his mam said, and rest her soul too, he supposed. Houses, people, cities—everything was cursed with the past. But enough of all that. No sense in dwelling on that you couldn’t do a damn thing to change.

Rabbi was still crouched on the floor. He had a nest of lights knotted in his lap, the room dark but for them, bright reds and greens, yellows and blues, when the door opened. He didn’t turn his head, not yet.

“Wasn’t expecting to be seeing you this soon,” he said. There was plenty you learned about a person if you spent enough time with them. Going on twenty years with this one, and Rabbi knew Calamita the same you might know the weather: you recognized the patterns, you could forecast what might come, but every now and again you found yourself devastatingly caught unawares.

Calamita said nothing as he stepped into the room, shut the door behind him. Unhurried as he moved, same as he ever was. In a way, in his way, as carefully prepared as prey can ever be, Rabbi had been waiting. He’d made his play earlier that day, first with Josto outside his new lady’s place, and then at Joplin’s. The consequence would come for him; he had made the mistake of thinking he might’ve got longer.

The lights held after dimming for a moment. Rabbi looked up, finally, at him. He nodded towards him—his face, the brand, in particular. “That looks like it smarts.”

Calamita shrugged. He could hear the leather of his gloves crinkle as he clenched his fingers at his sides. The lights flickered once. “I do not notice.” A lie; Rabbi could not help the quick, knowing twist that came to his mouth. Knew Calamita saw it when he lifted his chin in silent defiance.

Rabbi turned his attention back to the tangle of lights. He worked to loosen them as he considered how best to play this. On the one hand, he could go for making Calamita think he’d thought better on his prior actions and plead forgiveness. A useless strategy—he’d die a coward for that, sooner most like than later. The alternative: he’d hold his ground and build it high.

“You’re a brave one, coming ‘round here when Boss is this cross with you. And rightfully so, you don’t mind me saying.”

“I mind plenty.” He said it dismissively though, so that was something.

Calamita eyed the old armchair with disdain. He took a seat anyhow, his legs spread wide. He sat there as if it was more akin to a throne than a hand-me-down chair in the former care of a dead relation to the family. For but a brief moment, Rabbi had the thought that he sat with more confidence than Josto had ever possessed, and maybe that right there was a source of more trouble down the line.

Calamita pulled his gloves off, finger by finger.

“Does Boss know you’re here?” There was an angle potentially to be exploited here, a chance to see if Calamita would slip, make clear who he really considered Boss.

“Josto, he is not like his father. You notice this?” No slipping then. Calamita smirked. “I know you do, Irish. You, you see everything. He is weak, despite what he says to his brother.”

“You make him weaker, I know that much. You and Gaetano. All that in-fighting you’ve stirred up between the brothers—it’s weakness, it is, and you best believe Cannon sees it, too.”

Calamita snickered. “You a rat for the mulignan boss now?”

The lights blinked off then on again, the room dark for a solid moment. When they returned, Rabbi held Calamita’s gaze.

“You know I’m not,” Rabbi said. “I just call it like I see it.”

Calamita chuckled, the sound of it low and rumbling. “You are tough guy with the gun, yeah? But without it—not so much.” Calamita glanced around the room. “You are an errand boy.”

Rabbi shrugged this time. “I never found much shame in it, doing what needs done. Don’t intend to start now.”

Calamita gestured to Rabbi with the pair of gloves clutched in his hand. “I always like this about you, Rabbi. You know what you are and you do not forget it.”

He said it very nearly with a kindness but for that persistent edge, like a razor blade hidden along his bottom lip. Rabbi knew well what to do with the latter, never the former. Historically, any kindness Calamita had exercised in Rabbi’s direction always came along that serrated blade, the uncertainty not whether it would cut but how deep.

Rabbi made a soft, scoffing sound in the back of his throat. “So which is it you’re pissed at me for then? Ratting you out, or have I tallied some other, more grievous, offense to my name?”

“I come by because you and me? We are going to have a conversation.”

Rabbi gripped the string of lights in his hands. He briefly lit—and no pun intended at that—on the thought of using it as a makeshift garrote, lights still twinkling, or trying to, festooned and tightening around Calamita’s throat.

“And what is it you’re thinking we have to discuss with each other? ”

Calamita reached into his coat pocket. Rabbi went very still. The room was small and there was nowhere to go, neither to run or to hide. But to Rabbi’s surprise, Calamita pulled out an orange. It was battered-looking and bruised in the low light. He leaned down and rolled it across the uneven wood floor to him, Rabbi plucking it up as it neared him. The peel was very dirty, sooty even, blistered in spots. He looked up at Calamita, quizzical.

Calamita nodded to him. “This is what we are dealing with.”

Rabbi tossed the orange up and caught it. “A bad crop of oranges then?”

“Do not be cute with me. The brown boys—they take them, along with our more interesting merchandise.” The guns. Rabbi wasn’t stupid. He listened, especially when he wasn’t the party spoken to. Josto’s wrath had rained down from up high when news of the jacked shipment reached him.

Rabbi pointed at Calamita, the orange still gripped against his palm, his other fingers curled around it. “On account of you, getting ideas. Trying to put the fix on young Cannon.”

“And if you’d’ve done as you were told, they’d be too frightened to take so much as a crumb from us.”

“Is that really how you think this works? You think you can kill Loy Cannon’s son and they’ll just, what? Leave town? Fly the white flag of surrender? They’ll fight back, of course. Give worse than they got. They kill Zero, they come for Josto, for Gaetano, anyone with the name Fadda attached to their person. You put a target on all our backs with that joke of a play.”

“This is what you think, but it is not as I do. I know, you take what a man loves, you break him. When he is broken, he goes foolish, stupid. Easy to pick off.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.” He pointed at Rabbi. “You fucked it up, you made this mess.”

Rabbi shook his head. “Nah. You backed the wrong horse, Calamita. You can’t go around blaming others for the problems you create yourself. A man doesn’t do that.”

“Tell me more, what it is you think men do.”

Despite any care Rabbi might have taken, the tenor of the conversation had changed. Shifted, like the wind. The private darkness of the room certainly didn’t help. He was tempted to get to his feet, find a lamp to switch on, something, anything, to redirect their course. Instead, Rabbi didn’t move. He stayed down on the floor.

“You tell me, is this the shakedown or the seduction?” Rabbi tried glib humor on for size, mostly failed. Gallows humor and self-deprecation usually served him better. Off Calamita’s studied blank look, Rabbi flashed a tight and wary smile, his lips pressed together, humorless. The lights flickered again, across both their faces. “You trying to wound me or woo me, I’m saying.”

The lights flickered again. Calamita’s face went from bright to dark, bright to dark, primary colors working against shadow, rendering him both familiar and deeply strange. The way he was looking at him wasn’t right, he saw that much. Rabbi watched as a grin cut across that face, never a particularly appealing sight with him. It was usually the wind-up pitch before the curveball driving fast over the plate.

“You keep the two separate, do you, Rabbi? A boring life you must lead. Like a monk.”

“Hardly that holy or scholarly, I’d be the first to admit to it.”

“But you are smart. You think you are smart.” An interminable pause stretched between them Rabbi had no interest in interrupting. “That is a question, and I want an answer.”

“Sure, yeah, I’m smarter than the Average Joe. I get by.”

“Yes, you think you are smart. Yet, you think you can fuck with me and I will not fuck you.”

Rabbi swallowed. “Who’s saying I think that?” He thought quickly. Cleverly, he hoped. “You can’t be killing me in Boss’s house, y’know, not with the Donna and the kids here. They’ll gut you for certain for that.”

“Who said anything about killing?”

Rabbi went cold and hot all at once. The sensation left him with a chilled sweat that broke out along the back of his neck. He knew the play now. He knew the rumors, too, the ones that circulated about the both of them—though never together, always separate. Rabbi’s father was an old pervert who liked his boys young and didn’t much care who he buggered, including his own sons. Wasn’t true, for whatever that was worth; Yiddles Milligan had no love to give his son Patrick, even a love or attention this awful or wrong or depraved. All the same, Rabbi’d been called queer and every other word for it by every member of the Fadda family for long as he could recall, and that part, at least, was true. Not that he ever did much about it.

Calamita on the other hand—he was dangerous enough to keep anyone from dare say anything in his earshot. He might’ve dressed the part of the nance—his clothing immaculate, shoes always shined even in the gritty Kansas City winter, a paisley scarf draped about his neck—but unless one was craving a visit with the undertaker, they knew better than to mock let alone mention it. Calamita, for all his bloodlust, understood the most important rule of this racket: it wasn’t personal, it was business. He let nothing of the personal enter into the equation for him. He didn’t let anyone know him beyond one fact: he was a killer, and he was damn good at it.

And if Rabbi he knew anything, and he liked to think he did, he knew violence. He knew, there were other ways to wreck a man beyond killing him. That there was a violence to unmaking a man, showing him his world wasn’t as he thought it to be. That there were things he wanted, things he did not know about himself, and a man had to know who he was if he wanted to survive. The lights went out, came back on, and Rabbi was tired, down to the very marrow of himself. In truth, he’d long felt a tide of inevitability, and here it was, finally come to shore right there in this room with them.

He tried to laugh. “Seduction it is then, yeah?”

Calamita stood up. From Rabbi’s vantage on the floor, he was taller than ever. Rabbi watched as he took off first his coat and then his scarf. He set both down on that long-dead aunt’s chair. He’d already lost his tie somewhere in the day’s travels, the collar open, something terribly human about the dip of his throat, the hollow there, rather than blandly—impersonally—anatomical. Perhaps it was because Rabbi was already picturing his own mouth there, tasting. The sudden vividness of the image hit like a punch to the gut. A man, he thought, was meant to know what he wanted. He wasn't supposed to want this, not with him.

Calamita took a deliberate step towards him. His hands were at his belt. “You still do not get it,” he said. His fingers moved deftly, everything about him still reined in tight and in control. Less man, more machine, Rabbi thought. Or, he did. The cock he undressed was all man, pink and thick even as it rested soft in his hand.

Rabbi dropped the coil of lights, still plugged in and blinking steadily now, to the floor. He tried to recall if Calamita had locked the door.

“You’ll have to ask for it,” Rabbi heard himself say. His mouth felt gummy as it went dry.

Calamita now stood directly over him. “No,” he said. He threaded a hand through Rabbi’s hair, his grip that much too tight, his scalp singing with it. “I won’t.”

There were plenty of things Rabbi was going to have to live with, and that included the fact he didn’t resist. Not even a little. He leaned into Calamita’s guiding hand and he parted his lips. He was going to have to live with that, have to live with knowing the taste of him now, too. Even soft, his cock rested heavy on his tongue.

Rabbi brought him to hardness with his mouth messy and spit-slick, with a surprising lack of comment from Calamita about his clumsy inexperience. He gagged on him, as he grew in his mouth, threatened his throat. His hands scrabbled at the pressed wool of Calamita’s trousers and Rabbi swallowed rapidly around him. Audibly. Calamita made noises of his own as he fucked Rabbi’s mouth, each sound taut and tight, as if captured behind clenched teeth. Rabbi tried to breathe through his nose; he tried to ground himself, remember himself, against a desire that tripped through him like a reckless intruder. Instead, each detail became that much more vibrant in his mind. Calamita tasted salty, vital and hot, animal, and he felt an answering, betraying twitch in his own trousers. He took note of the press of Calamita's fingers along his jaw, at his cheek; he groaned deeply at the feel of his own cock in Rabbi’s mouth. When his hand dropped down to Rabbi’s throat, Rabbi made an anxious noise.

“Easy, easy,” Calamita said. Rabbi’s eyes flickered closed. The lights flickered with him. There was no edge to his voice or to his words and it was the worst thing Rabbi had ever heard. A hot flush burned his face. It could feel a lot like shame, he knew, if he let it. He didn’t.

“Enough,” Calamita said suddenly. He yanked at Rabbi’s hair, pulled his mouth off of him. A string of spit dripped from Rabbi’s bottom lip to the head of Calamita’s cock.

With the same degree of abruptness, Calamita crouched down to Rabbi’s level. The lights' glow hollowed out his face as he moved quick, came closer, until he was the only thing to be seen, in both shadow and light. His long legs bent, his body bent at the waist, and his mouth descended on his. Everything about it was unexpected, in a capacity Rabbi thought he’d always lack the ability to articulate. It was a kiss in every technical sense of the act and the term, but it felt more like a collision, possessing both that brutality he had been looking for from the start but tempered by an all too personal awkwardness. It was as if they couldn’t get their mouths to match without effort—teeth knocking into teeth, noses and chins bumping together. Rabbi's front tooth snagged against the swell of Calamita’s lip and Calamita snarled in reply. The tang of blood mixed with the taste Rabbi already had of him in his mouth.

As his weight bore down on him, Rabbi’s fingers curled at his shoulder, into his well-pressed shirt. In turn, Calamita’s hands cupped his face, the way lovers did in the pictures when they kissed. Rabbi did not think that was what they were, even as they writhed and pushed like this, tried to find entrance in each other. But Calamita’s hands on him felt like finally finishing a sentence. It had been hanging, suspended, half-written and nearly spoken since he had first met him. That was a dangerous thought, he knew. He slicked his tongue against Calamita’s and Calamita’s fingers tightened beneath his jaw. There should be more violence to it, Rabbi thought, like that grapple in the front of Calamita’s car. Something to protect them from accusation of anything worse between them than mutual struggle and dislike. In the gleaming shine of the red and the yellow lights closest to their faces, Rabbi pressed his own finger to the barely healed brand on his cheek. Calamita hissed, swatted at his hand. Pushed his wrist down to the floor at such an angle it made his shoulder twinge.

He moved quickly then. Calamita’s hands snapped then at Rabbi’s suspenders. He shoved them down with a haste belying either greed or hunger, both, that he might not have expected of him. The knot in his gut tightened that much more, nearly pleasurable in its discomfort. In anticipation. His hands pushed at his sweater next, and Rabbi let him, took over as Calamita’s impatience became more obvious. He was left in his old, dingy undershirt, the chill of the room unable to reach him, his body absorbing the heat of the one pressed to him. Calamita manhandled him further, roughly, down to the ground, the floor hard and ungiving beneath his shoulder blades. It was easy enough to raise his hips, let Calamita take both trousers and skivvies down with them. Rabbi was skinny, all jutting bone trying to poke through pale skin, a body designed as if to receive arrows before receiving martyrdom. His ribs rose and fell, visible even from under his undershirt, as he tried—and failed—to steady his breath. His cock was hard, curved up towards his belly, in want of attention. Betraying any attempt at feigned lack of interest, not that he had yet bothered to try to pretend this wasn’t anything he wanted. The twist of Calamita’s features, the narrowing of his eyes and the lift to his mouth, said that he was pleased.

Just as he had maneuvered him here, Calamita rolled him, pushed up onto his knees. With Calamita, fear was always easy to find and Rabbi found it now. It kicked up a drumbeat in his chest, blood loud in his ears. He thought of the worst things he had let any other man do to him and wondered, morbidly, eagerly, how Calamita would find a way to out-do them.

You didn’t bare yourself to anybody, not in this racket. Christ, but he’d learnt that lesson hard and bitter from jump. Yet here he was, naked, in more ways than physical, as he remained as Calamita had placed him, on his hands and knees. As he turned his head, to look back over his shoulder, he saw him, backlit and looming behind him. He turned back around the second he felt his hands on him. Calamita first dragged a hand over his hip and down his flank before he came back up, grabbed at his ass and spread him. Rabbi exhaled noisily, his fingers curling against the floor. He tried to ready himself for what he thought would come, but instead Calamita had found something to do to him worse than exacting pain. His tongue was wet, slippery, as it licked and pressed against him. Rabbi muttered a temper of curses into the floor and it was mere moments before his thighs began to tremble. Calamita opened him on his tongue and his fingers, patient, pushing him further along into senselessness. It was a filthy act, Rabbi thought, even as he was delivered closer and closer to begging him for more. If anything, Rabbi was used to hurried backroom assignations with strangers. This was its opposite, devastatingly thorough as Calamita continued to lick at him, into him. It was unbearable to have someone who had known him as long as he had touch him like this. Intimacy, maybe. Maybe that was what it was. Rabbi shook and groaned against it.

When Calamita pulled back from him, his hand pushed up the back of his undershirt, baring the bony knobbed ridge of his spine. He spat before he pressed the head of his cock against him. Rabbi’s body bowed, defensively, as if trying to place distance between them, but Calamita held him still if not steady. His cock was nothing like his fingers, thick and unforgiving, as it breached him. Rabbi tried to breathe through it, wasn’t much good at it. His chest heaved and his body tensed, even as he heard the censorious click of Calamita’s tongue. He offered a brief rub at his hip, which only made him tense more.

“Ask me for it.”

The easy mockery of the question was familiar. Rabbi could scarcely get a breath in though, his chest felt so constricted and tight. His knees protested against the floor. He dropped his head between his shoulders, made a shaky noise that could fairly be mistaken for a laugh. It was oddly this that made him relax more, relax enough that Calamita could begin to push inside of him.

“Oh, fuck off,” Rabbi finally managed to say. He heaved another breath; it too sounded like the start of a laugh, rueful and nearly mean. “You know I want it.”

Rabbi’s pulse thumped in his throat. He wondered if Calamita could see it, his face was so close to the length of his neck, his breath hot and claustrophobic on overheated skin. Christ, but it hurt. It hurt less in the way he was used to, those hurried fucks like the bad-end of a business deal, but in a far more exposed and personal way. As if it might have been easier if Calamita had chosen to flay him alive instead. It was a curious thing to let a man who knew your entire history, inside and out, learn that final piece of you. Rabbi bit his forearm as Calamita pushed that final inch inside of him.

He ached around him, as he tried to make him fit inside his own body—same as he had been forced to try to make him fit inside his life for years. Rabbi panted as Calamita’s hand rested hot in the center of his back, his undershirt rucked up to his shoulders now. His hand rubbed, in a small circle, until his hand traveled up, to settle heavy and warm against the nape of his neck. It was as if he was calming him, or trying to, which was somehow more disconcerting than the alternative.

“That’s it, that’s good,” he said, and Rabbi bucked, his body moving without his permission. He fucked himself back onto Calamita’s cock, the depth and the angle that much different as Calamita moved against him, lifting Rabbi’s hips slightly. He hit something in him that took his breath away, made his entire body seize, clench down tight around him. Calamita grunted. He began to fuck him then, his pace rough, body curled over and around Rabbi. Sweat traced down Rabbi’s neck, his face, as overheated as if trapped in the belly of a furnace. Rabbi’s own cock went unattended, heavy and dripping between his legs.

Calamita was not what he might have expected, if he ever thought to think of things like this. He would have assumed a senseless drive, an interest in only his own satisfaction, exacted at any cost. Sadistic, cruel, pleasure one-sided, Rabbi’s body used same as any unlucky recipient of Calamita’s knife. Instead, he felt his fingers palming the back of his head, less holding him down and more as if petting him. The rhythm of his hips seemed more inclined in recapturing that initial overcome response from Rabbi as if what he liked best was less the fit and the clutch around his own cock but rather what he was doing to Rabbi. Forcing a reaction out of him, undoing him spectacularly. Making the things he had done and was doing to him undeniable—a part of Rabbi now.

Rabbi was swamped by overwhelm far too quickly. “I have to,” he was saying, control of his mouth and his words both ceded same as the rest of his body, “I’ve got to,” and rather than offer any relief, Calamita shushed him. He didn't stop him though, not as Rabbi dropped his weight down onto his shoulder, discomfort a hard line drawn through pleasure, and reached for his cock. Rabbi pulled at himself clumsily, his hand dry but for what he'd already spilled, unable to match Calamita’s pace, his cheek pressed against the cold wood floor. He spent over his hand with a shout and a suddenness that took both his breath and his strength. He was aware, as if at a stretch both too far and too close, of Calamita following him over—the hot pulse of him, twitching messy and wet inside of him—before he slumped bodily against him.

When he opened his eyes, the room was dark. The lights were dead. Rabbi was barely able to hold his weight up, let alone Calamita’s. Muscle-deep exhaustion had finally found him, like he had run a long way to get here. But it was Calamita’s hand, still tightly gripping his hip, that made him realize—he wasn’t done with him, not yet. Rabbi groaned preemptively. He felt first a chill at his back as Calamita moved off of him, a worse ache as he pulled out of him, and then his breath against his tailbone. He barely heard him as he chuckled: Rabbi’s head was boxed in by his own arms as if trying to protect himself. Again, Calamita pressed his tongue to him and Rabbi felt himself whining, the noise muffled against the floor. It was far too much—it was a violence, cruelty. He felt the travel of his mouth over him, where he still gaped from his use, each brush of his lips and tongue careful but still nearly painful. He felt his fingers, maybe his thumb, holding him open, testing, his body involuntary trying and failing to clench around the intrusion. He was gentle in a way that for him should not have been possible. Rabbi screwed his eyes closed tight, his breath coming in sharp huffed gasps, when he thought he understood what Calamita was doing: he was cleaning him, tasting his own spilled come, with his mouth. He was looking at what he had done to him. He liked the obvious evidence of it, that was the only explanation Rabbi could think of, the excuse, for anything that felt so terrible and close to tenderness. Rabbi made another distressed sound, and then Calamita was moving him again, rolling him onto his back.

Rabbi opened his eyes. The lights were back on, a string of blinding green and blue and yellow loosed like a slack rope. Calamita continued his work against him. He mouthed at his balls, then started to lick at his cock that struggled in vain to harden again. “No,” Rabbi gasped when his mouth opened over the head, the wet heat of his mouth too much on his spent cock. Still, his hand clutched at Calamita, tugging him closer.

Calamita was insistent. Worse, now he was patient. Each time Rabbi told him he couldn’t—“I can’t, I can’t, please”—Calamita would hum against him, in goading disapproval, the muscle of his jaw visibly flexing beneath his skin. Rabbi knew now, what that muscle felt like under his fingers. He knew his body could be used against him, that he wanted unspeakable things with the worst sort of man, and that, too, was a weapon. He curled his fingers in Calamita’s hair, both slightly stiff and soft with pomade. He pulled as his hips writhed to their own rhythm, demanded by Calamita, trying to mess him up as much as he had him.

He came a second time, his heels kicking at the floor, his cock spurting weakly, miserably. He made sounds that better suited a dying man, as if he could scarce catch his breath. All through it, Calamita’s weight held his body down.

Rabbi stood with his hands braced on his hips. The mirrored image of the lights was smudged and very nearly beautiful in the darkened window before him.

“What’s this now?” From behind him came not only his voice but the clink of his belt buckle, the rustling of clothing as they went straightened; before him, the bare sketch of Calamita’s reflection in the dark window. After, Rabbi had dressed quickly, albeit unsteadily, he was loathe to admit. Calamita, as in all things, took his time. “You regret it already?”

Rabbi shook his head, his back still to Calamita. “Nah,” he finally said. “Just having myself a think.” He glanced over his shoulder at Calamita. He was fixing the shirt cuffs at his wrists, his gaze barely lifted to Rabbi. “Rearranging myself around what’s been done, like.”

Calamita stilled. He stood up straight. He looked at Rabbi as if he had somehow gravely insulted him. “The fuck does that mean?”

Rabbi shook his head again. “Never you mind.”

Calamita reached into his pocket. There was no haste in his movement, but Rabbi’s eyes tracked him, wary as anything. It was a comb, not a knife, he unsheathed. He dragged it through his hair, quickly, efficiently, rearranging himself in his own way.

“You’ll kill me, won’t you.” It wasn’t a question. The Virgin Mary looked down at him with condescending pity.

Calamita briefly grinned. He mimed pointing a gun at Rabbi. He pretended to fire, he mouthed the word, “ _bang_.” He pulled his coat back on, looped his scarf about his neck, and strode over to the door. “Irish,” he said, with his own brand of condescending pity. “You know. You are already dead.”

He shut the door behind him. The string of lights blinked one last time and then, finally, went out.

**Author's Note:**

> Yup, I definitely bastardized one of my favorite lines from the series here, from Season 3 to be exact: “And I wanna say more, I do, but there’s violence to knowing the world isn’t what you thought.” Apologies, on multiple fronts, to Noah Hawley. 
> 
> Last, thank you so much for reading! I'm over on tumblr: @widespindriftgaze. And last, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!


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